Lending your essay - friendship or deception?

Recently it was discovered that two students enrolled in STU101 had submitted alarmingly similar essays. The students involved have declined to comment, but inside sources claim that one of the students had lent their assignment to the other, as they were behind in their study; the 'lender' was apparently completely unaware that the 'borrower' had blatantly copied their work. The question now is "who is at fault?"

Recycling - good for cans and bottles but not for academic work

Although conscientious waste disposal and recycling is encouraged around campus, the re-submission of coursework is strongly discouraged. Recently, several cases where students have submitted essays for more than one assignment have come to the attention of staff. These cases have ranged from reusing multiple paragraphs within a previous essay to reusing the entire essay with a new title. Each case is being reviewed separately, but all are considered direct plagiarism even though it is their own work that students are plagiarising.

"I really thought that because I had written the essay in the first place that I could reuse some of the paragraphs. After all, the essay topic wasn't much different and I got a really good mark for it".

However, having spoken to the department it transpires that this student received a zero the second time around. Apparently, this type of recycling produces red faces rather than a greener planet.

"We strongly encourage students to discuss the issues and concepts they are taught in their courses,

and there is no doubt that discussion around the assignment topics is beneficial to the end result. However, the line is drawn when it comes to writing your assignments – this must be your own work and written in your own words".

"We quite often get students asking whether they need to acknowledge data that they have used from a spreadsheet. Of course we try to make it as clear

as possible that students need to reference all of the sources that they have used, but occasionally we do have plagiarism of this nature and have to give a zero for the assignment as is faculty policy".

Similarly, a staff member from Computer Science said...

"We had a case last week where a student had used computer code from a source on the internet and had failed to acknowledge that source. It is very important that students understand that the author giving permission for the code to be used elsewhere does not mean that they do not need to acknowledge the original author – they do!"